You’ll notice a new search function over at the top right of the blog.  That’s our spankin new lijit search.  We’re honored that lijit has included us in their “cool stuff” page and wanted to tell you a little bit about lijit, since we don’t have a cool stuff page.

You might have already heard of lijit. As long as I’ve been blogging, they have been known to be “the” search plug-in for blogs.

The default wordpress search is pretty basic.  Type a keyword, find posts with that tag, and then you cayawwwwwwwwwn.  Oh sorry…faded out there for a minute.

Switch to lijit…

lijit will crawl your blog content for you, and provides all the relevant content from your site without having to rely on keywords to find relevant posts.

Do you use twitter? Delicious? Disqus? Well then you’ll love lijit’s next big feature, the content search.  You can add your account from a number of different networks.  Much like your blog posts, lijit will crawl your content for you and users can search through your blog content and your content on other networks, side by side.

Not enough you say?  Well then maybe you’ll be as impressed as I was by the stats that they offer you.

To name a few of the metrics you can track:

• Total searches
• Conversions from view to search
• Keyword search rates
• User Location (using maps)
• Searches that brought readers to your blog
• Exposure statistics

They truly have a great product and a great team to support it.  Any questions I’ve had have been answered promptly and their employees are all very helpful.

If you’re looking for a good search plug-in for your blog, I recommend you go lijit. Go ahead, search our blog and try it out.

I know I know, it’s been a little quiet around here lately. Just think of it as the quiet before the storm as we’re working up a sweat behind the scenes to make Scribnia bigger and better after listening to your feedback. There are a lot of updates coming your way that we think you’ll really dig.

Of course, we can’t do anything without asking you first, so we’re asking for your thoughts again. We need a sweet tagline! Either vote for your favorite of the three options below, or if you think you’ve got something better, submit your own tagline…

If you’re going to be at blogworld, be sure to let us know. You can email me at david [at] scribnia dot com. We’re doing short video interviews with our community members and bloggers to be featured on our blog and around our community elsewhere.

See you there!

Photo cred: Pieter Musterd

Hello all and welcome to the revitalization of the Scribnia Blog!  Did you miss us?  We missed you too.  A lot has been happening over here and we haven’t exactly done our part to keep you guys well informed, so now we fix that.

As you know, Scribnia was part of the Dreamit Ventures program this summer.  Well, about two months into the summer, Scribnia was purchased by the new and current owner, Marc Duquette, a marketer and entrepreneur based out of Montreal.  Marc is extremely excited to build Scribnia to a whole new level and has some big plans in store.

The team is now a healthy mixture of old and new members.   I will continue to serve as your community manager and am pumped to do so.  We are very excited to be working together and have been brainstorming our butts off to make Scribnia a better site.  That means you can expect a lot of improvements and new features to be announced.

If you don’t already, be sure to follow us on twitter to stay updated on our new features as they are released.  We’ll also be using the blog to keep you informed.  We are ready to take Scribnia to the next level, and hope that you, our most enthusiastic users will join us for the ride!

Here’s to you!

-The Scribnia Team

Photo cred: Pieter Musterd

Online content is amazing because it’s so much more than just the content.  It’s also about who’s reading it, how they feel about what they’re reading, who else is writing about the same topic, why you’re writing it…in essence, it’s about the community surrounding it.

A newspaper has readers.  A tv show has viewers.  Online content producers have a community.

The extent to which writes can connect with their readers online is limitless.  New tools are coming out every day to create new ways for readers and writers to interact.  One of our goals for Scribnia is to break down the writer/reader barrier even more, and allow for even more interaction within your community.

If columnists for “mainstream” media are going to find success in the future, they’ll have to embrace the community aspect of online content, the same way bloggers do.

We hope that Scribnia will serve as a valuable tool that allows authors and readers build a stronger community.  We hope it will connect readers to bloggers that otherwise never would have found each other.

We’ve created a few ways to make Scribnia more social, allowing for authors to create more engagement within their community.

• Invite Friends: To invite your community to come join Scribnia, and write or receive reviews.
• Search Scribnia: Find and follow friends that are already on Scribnia.
• ScribUp: Promote your favorite authors on twitter.
• Tweet This: Under each review, you can click the “tweet this” link to share your review on twitter.

If you have any other ideas for how we can make Scribnia a more social tool, that owuld help you to build your community, let us know.

You excited about Scribnia yet? Well hopefully this helps.  We’ve just added a new feature to Scribnia called “ScribUP”.  Now whenever you view an author page, you’ll see the ScribUP option on the top right.  When you click that cute little bird that’s taken over so many lives, a new page will open up to the twitter homepage with a message all set up for you in the text box.

For example, if I wanted to ScribUp Mike Fisher, I’d click on the ScribUP link in his author page, and this message will come up in the Twitter text box: “Big fan of @fishsports http://scribnia.com/author/show/956/mike-fisher/ #ScribUp”

Don’t like that message? Feel free to change it around however you like, just be sure to include the author’s name or “@username” and the #scribUP hashtag.

By including those two things in your tweet, we are able to track how many #ScribUps an author gets, and you guessed it, it will then improve that authors Scribnia ranking!  …and yes, even ReTweets count. So not only do you get to share your favorite authors on twitter and link back to their reader reviews, but you also improve their ranking, increasing their visibility on the site.  If that doesn’t make a blogger/author happy, I don’t know what will.

We’re working very hard here to make Scribnia as valuable to bloggers, authors and readers as possible.  We have a few more features coming your way in the near future so keep your eyes open.  Also, we value your feedback, so don’t hesitate to leave any suggestions you have for features you’d like us to add by clicking the feedback link all the way in the bottom right of the Scribnia website.

Cheers!

The Scribnia Team

As many of you already know, Scribnia is now in Beta mode and is open to the public. It’s been an exciting time since launching our beta version.  We were featured on Mashable, have enjoyed an influx of excited new authors and readers, and have been working hard to add more features to make Scribnia into a better, more efficient service.

With the exception of a couple little hiccups that our active users have brought to our attention, everything seems to be in order on the site.  If you find any issues, don’t hesitate to contact us and we’ll get it fixed right up for you.  If oyu have any ideas that would make Scribnia better for your needs, let us know.

We’re no longer in alpha so invite away.  Some of your friends may be on Scribnia already…you can find them and follow them here.  Not here yet? You can upload your email contacts and invite them to Scribnia here.

I’m very excited to watch the community grow and develop into what I hope and know it could be.

Welcome to all our new users coming in after reading the review of Scribnia on Mashable.  Hope you’ve enjoyed using the site so far.  So with all the new users, I thought this a good time for a post with some tips to get more reviews on your author page.  Why do you want more reviews? Well, the more reviews you have, the better chance you have to be ranked highly in your category, the more feedback you receive from your readers and the more you have to show for yourself as an author or blogger.  So, here are 5 tips to get you more reviews…

1. Be active on the site. Afterall, this is a community built on our willingness to share as a community.  Do unto others…that whole deal.  If you review someone on Scribnia, they may be more likely to drop by and write a review for you as well.  The more you comment, review or even just a quick thumbs up, the greater chance someone will take a look at your author page.
2. Add the Widget. The widget is a simple and effective way to encourage your readers, new and old, to go review you on Scribnia.  Throw it in your sidebar and let your readers know its there (some might only follow you in an aggregator like google reader).  To learn more about the widget read our last post.
3. Write a post. I’ve found personally, that when looking for feedback from my readers, the best method is to just write a post calling out for their help.  I did this once when I had horrible writers block and my readers came through.  Just write a post encouraging your readers to go to Scribnia and write a review of you.  Mike Fisher is a great example of a user that reached out to his community and received amazing feedback.
4. Just ask. Writing a post didn’t work, fine.  You have a lazy readership and they need a little kick in the butt.  Send some of your most loyal readers a quick message asking them to review you.  Sometimes the best way to get someone to do something is to just ask!  They’ll almost always happily oblige.
5. Evalutation? Wow are your readers lazy…or are they?  If you can’t get anyone to review you, that could be telling of the kind of content that you write.  Is it compelling? Unique? Readers aren’t going to review if they have nothing to say, good or bad.  Get creative.  Think about how you can engage your community with your content in a different way.  Maybe this is just the kind of signal you needed…or maybe your readers really are THAT lazy.

Do you have any ideas for getting more reviews? What has worked for you?

Lots of exciting things going on over here at Scribnia in the next couple weeks. Hope you guys have enjoyed the features we’ve added so far and there’s more to come. Today we are releasing our widget!

Bloggers and authors can now install our widget on their sites, displaying their ranking on Scribnia and prompting readers to go review them.  We hope that you, the bloggers and authors that drive active communities of loyal readers, will find this to be a valuable learning tool, encouraging your readers to provide you with valuable feedback about you as an author.

Plus, as you get more reviews, the ranking strength of your author page increases (ie. if you have close scores with another author in your segment, but you have 10 reviews and they have 3, you win!)…So when someone browses Scribnia for authors, you’ll be higher up on the page…it’s SSO (Search Scribnia Optimization)

If you need any help getting the widget set up, we’ll be glad to help.  Either message me on the site or drop me an email at DavidSpinks@Scribnia.com.

All feedback appreciated.  If there are other widgets that you’d like us to provide, let us know…

Enjoy! and happy reading (=